The importance of email technology in society today is well known. Email applications have become a common tool in both business and personal communication. A significant factor in the widespread adoption of email technology is the relative ease with which individuals may communicate using email. An individual may quickly communicate a message to one or more individuals by simply inputting the message and the recipients' email address into an email application and clicking a mouse button. One of the primary reasons email is so attractive is that the messages are typically delivered within seconds of being sent.
FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary network on which email messaging may occur. As shown, each of the computer clients, Client A 120, Client B 121, Client C 122, and Client D 123, is coupled to a network 100. This network may be a private network, a public network such as the Internet, or a combination thereof. The computer clients (120, 121, 122, 123) are able to communicate with each other through virtual connections over network 100. These virtual connections allow the clients (120, 121, 122 and 123) to send and receive electronic mail messages from the other clients.
Many email users access their email through web mail applications which display a user's email inbox and the corresponding email messages in a web page environment. One of the advantages of web mail applications is that the user may access their email from any location that provides access to the World Wide Web. When a user logs into their email account, they are typically presented with an inbox view that provides a list of the various email messages the user has received. When the user selects a particular email message, for example, by clicking on the message within the list, a request is sent to a web server requesting the selected message. The server responds with the email message which is displayed to the user as a new web page.
Typically, the web page displaying the message includes one or more reply options. Examples of response options include Reply, Reply-to-All and Forward. These response options are usually presented to the user as links or buttons that the user may select. Reply allows the user to reply to the originator of the message. Reply-to-All allows the user to reply to all of the recipients of the message. The Forward option allows the user to forward the email to a user who was not one of the original recipients of the message.
When a user selects one of the response options in a web based email application, a request is sent to a remote email server requesting the reply web page corresponding to the selected response option. This page typically includes a text box for inputting the reply message and one or more address fields for inserting the recipient addresses. When the user selects the Reply or Reply-to-All option, the server typically inserts the appropriate recipient address information into the address fields.
Typically, a user must choose the response option at the time he decides to respond to the email. If the user later changes his mind and wants to select a different response option, he cannot do so from the reply web page returned by the server. In order to select a different response option, the user would have to return to the original message web page. This process may result in multiple requests to the server which increases web traffic and adds additional latency to the user experience. If the user provides part or all of a response message into the reply web page before changing his mind on the response options, the user would lose the message unless he copied the message before returning to the original message and pasted it into the new reply web page returned by the server upon selecting the new response option.
These same limitations are also present in client-side email applications such as Microsoft Outlook. When the user selects a particular response option, a new message window is created including the recipient addresses associated with the response option. However, if the user wishes to change to a different response option, the user must close the window and select a different response option. These applications do not provide the user with a mechanism to dynamically change the response option for his message. As a result, if the user has provided part or all of a message prior to deciding to select a different response option, the user must either copy the message and paste it into the new reply window, or must manually enter the additional recipient addresses.
Accordingly, what is desirable are improved systems and methods for addressing the above-described limitations of prior systems.